6000 empty homes and a housing crisis

bristol | community | news report Wednesday June 03, 2009 21:26 by Neil Roberts

Last week’s Friday Drive show on 93.2 BCFM focused on housing in Bristol.

Below is the script of a report on empty property in the city and the freedom of information data on which it was based.

I have also linked to a list of every empty residential property in Bristol (as of April 2009) and a KML file plotting the addresses for use with Google Earth or Google Maps.

There are almost six-thousand empty residential properties in Bristol.

Figures from the Empty Homes Agency suggest that around two-thousand of these have been empty for more than six-months.

At a time when politicians and housing campaigners are concerned about a housing shortage; when local residents are fighting plans to build new homes on greenbelt land, you may wonder why there are so many empty properties in Bristol.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, we have obtained detailed information from Bristol City Council.

We have discovered that in April this year there were 5976 empty domestic properties across Bristol.

Now, obviously, it's hard to tell a lot about these properties from a long list of addresses, but we've tried to analyse the information we have.

We mapped the data so that we can more easily see the geographic spread of these empty houses.

Looking at the map, we can see that the empty houses seem to be clustered around inner-city areas and areas in South Bristol.

Parts of East Bristol around Easton, Lawrence Hill and Eastville look like they have the highest density of empty homes.

So why are these homes empty? Well according to Bristol City Council, there are several categories of empty property which are exempt from council tax.

These include properties undergoing major building work, recently built properties and repossessed homes.

I went out with our list to have a look at some of the empty homes in the city.

What I found was a mixture of run down or abandoned houses, empty houses for let and also groups of empty apartments in brand new complexes.

One of these apartment blocks is The Crescent on Hanover Quay on the Harbourside.

This block of 272 luxury flats was opened last summer.

There are 85 empty flats, some of them still being built.

I was told by a sales rep that the flats are a fifty-fifty mix of buy-to-let and buy-to-live properties.

The minimum price for these flats is £190,000 for a one-bed-flat.

This seems to be a fairly typical example of some of Bristol's empty property clusters.

These large blocks of luxury homes planned at the height of the housing boom and aimed at the buy-to-let market are now suffering because the recession.

The problem is, of course, that there are still many people in Bristol who don’t have a decent place to live.

There are around 3000 overcrowded households in Bristol. There are more than 500 people registered as homeless, nearly 300 people in temporary housing and more than 10,000 people on the council housing waiting list.

This is a housing crisis which can only really be solved by providing more low-cost social housing for rent.

In Bristol there are only around 400 new social housing places being provided each year.

The Empty Homes Agency is a charity which campaigns for empty properties to be brought back into use to help ease homelessness.

They campaign for an end to tax breaks on empty properties and for local authorities to take over long-term empty properties to bring back into use.

Other housing campaigners say that unsold new homes and empty homes held by property speculators and buy-to-let landlords should be confiscated by local councils and used for social housing.

Bristol City Council has policies on empty homes which recognise the environmental and social problems caused by high numbers of empty properties in an area.

They have a number of ways of helping owners sell or rent their empty properties.

They say they are committed to bringing high numbers of empty homes back into use and that they can ultimately use compulsory purchase orders to take them over.

We contacted Bristol City Council and asked them to answer some questions about the high number of empty properties in the city but they hadn't got back to us by this afternoon.

We'll be putting some of this information up on Bristol.indymedia.org in the next few days.

The full feature, including interviews, can be heard online (from 15m30s): http://www.bcfm.org.uk/wp-content/Podcasts/29-may-2009-...5.mp3

FOI requests to Bristol City Council:

1) April 7 2009:

In response to your FOI enquiry I can advise that our Local Tax records show that there are 5976 empty
domestic properties and 1951 empty commercial properties and a detailed list is provided for the latter. In addition
I can advise that of the 5976 properties 357 are council owned of which 135 are held for major
redevelopment/demolition/disposal; 63 awaiting major repairs prior to relet and 159 ready to be let.

Empty residential properties: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rk2oLF79TkksDGCX...=html

KML file (for use with Google Earth or Maps, works best with Google Earth): http://two.xthost.info/snark/EmptyProperties.kml

2) May 5 2009:

The information you asked for in your e-mail of 7th April is provided below.
Request 1 - Number of people living in council housing and other social housing in Bristol for the years 2005,
2006, 2007, 2008, 2009

We do not hold data in relation to the number of people living in council housing. However, I can advise that
number of council dwellings for the years in question were as follows:
2005 - 29,693
2006 - 29,078
2007 - 28,981
2008 - 28,741
2009 - 28,533

Request 2 - Number of people waiting to be housed in council or social housing in Bristol for years 2005, 2006,
2007, 2008, 2009
2005 - 11,809
2006 - 12,297
2007 - 14,448
2008 - 10,106
2009 - this data will be available in August

Request 3 - How many new council and social housing places have been provided through new building projects
in Bristol in years 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
2004/5 - 474
2005/6 - 420
2006/7 - 487
2007/8 - 444
2008/9 - 551
2009/10 539 planned - outurn available in 2010

Request 4 - How many people living in council provided/arranged temporary housing for years 2005, 2006, 2007,
2008, 2009
2005 - 504
2006 - 592
2007 - 465
2008 - 381
2009 - 274

Request 5 - How many people were homeless in Bristol for years 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009
The number of people who were recorded as being statutorily homeless (may not include rough sleepers) were
as follows:
2004/5 - 3593
2005/6 - 3479
2006/7 - 2995
2007/8 - 1742
2008/9 - 534
2009/10 - data not available yet

3) May 21 2009:

Please find detailed below the breakdown between rent and shared ownership/sale of new build [Housing Association properties] over the last few years.

04 05
Rented 385
Intermediate rent 0
Shared ownership / sale 89
Total 474

05 06
Rented 346
Intermediate rent 0
Shared ownership / sale 74
Total 420

06 07
Rented 333
Intermediate 0
Shared / sale 154
Total 487

07 08
Rented 340
Intermediate 6
Shared / sale 159
Total 440*

08 09
Rented 394
Intermediate 73
Shared / sale 85
Total 552*

The totals with asterisks are best guesses (hence 440 07 08 not being the sum of the other elements) and will be verified at a later date.